The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks.
Steele received a B.A. in political science from Coe College, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. Steele met his wife, Rita, during his junior year at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was one of 18 black students in his class. Steele was active in SCOPE, a group linked to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he met Rita at an Activist meeting. In 1968, Steele graduated from Coe College and went on to earn his master's degree in sociology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Steele attended the University of Utah, where he taught black literature and studied for his Ph.D.
After earning a Ph.D. in English in 1974, Steele was offered a tenured position at the university but turned it down because of hostility encountered as part of an interracial couple in Utah. Steele accepted a position at San Jose State University as a professor of English literature and taught there from 1974 to 1991.
In 1990, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character. He is the brother of Claude Steele.
Steele wrote a short book, A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win, published in December 2007. The book contained Steele's analysis of Barack Obama's character as a child born to a mixed couple who then had to grow as a black man. Steele concluded that Obama is a "bound man" to his "black identity." Steele gives this description of his conclusion:
After Obama won the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Steele defended his analysis and claimed that the subtitle of the book was simply a marketing device that he had thought for "about 30 seconds." He explains Obama's victory by likening him to Louis Armstrong who donned the "bargainer's mask" in his bid for white acceptance. In his analysis, he takes whites, who he claims have for decades been stigmatized as racist and had to prove they are not, "off the hook."
